In Cameroon, civil war is brewing
along linguistic lines. Its origins lie in the botched decolonization of the
country’s anglophone territory, but President Paul Biya’s repressive regime has
poured fuel on the fire. Lorraine Mallinder reports.

Lucy speaks of her last day in
her village of Mbonge with arresting clarity. The 64-year-old was cooking
plantains to sell by the roadside when soldiers came sweeping in to root out
separatist rebels known as Amba Boys. She remembers the rat-a-tat-tat of
machine guns and the screams of villagers scattering ‘helter-skelter’ – many
fleeing to the bush, shot in the back as they ran. ‘Whosoever the bullets met,
the people died,’ she says.

Mbonge is in Cameroon’s
anglophone southwest. The soldiers were with the Rapid Intervention Battalion
(BIR), an elite Israeli- and US-trained corps deployed by the francophone
regime to crush an anglophone uprising in the northwest and southwest regions.
In Douala, a port city just over the border from anglophone Cameroon, countless
people who have fled the conflict tell similar stories: of security forces
shooting indiscriminately, torching homes and sometimes entire villages in
their determination to snuff out the separatist threat.

Some call it the ‘anglophone
problem’, others ‘the war’. Semantics can be blurring, but the numbers don’t
lie. At least 1,600 people have lost their lives, according to the
International Crisis Group (ICG). Caught between government forces and the Amba
Boys, nearly half a million have fled their homes, many trapped in the bush,
terrified of returning to their villages but unable to seek refuge in the
towns, often because they don’t have ID cards. Wary of being seen to take sides
in a conflict that is becoming deadlier by the day, NGOs struggle to get food
and medical assistance to those in need.

Colonel Didier Badjeck, chief of
army communications, terms the regime’s actions as ‘legitimate defence’. The
military, he claims, is targeting the Amba Boys – the nickname a reference to
the separatists’ self-declared independent state of Ambazonia – in their rural
camps, minimizing the risk of civilian deaths. He accuses groups like Human
Rights Watch (HRW), which has reported on military abuses, of supporting the
separatists. These groups, he says, are ‘compromising the country’s honour’.

One NGO source says otherwise.
The BIR, he says, has a ‘licence to kill’. And it wields it liberally, with
utter impunity.

At first sight, the
musket-bearing Ambas would appear to be no match for the mighty BIR and its
high-tech Israeli rifles. But the BIR and its lowlier army counterparts are
unaccustomed to cat-and-mouse games of guerrilla warfare. And the mice are
proving especially nimble, a rag-tag of around seven separatist militias and an
unknown number of smaller cells, according to ICG, who know the dense forests
like the backs of their hands. More importantly, the separatists have the
support of the people, for even if they themselves have been guilty of killings
and torture, anger at military excesses is reaching boiling point.

In recent speeches, President
Paul Biya has paid lip service to bilingualism and decentralization, but he
fails to convince. Lion Man, as his supporters call him, has not survived 36
years in power by making compromises. So confident is he of his cast-iron grip
on the country, maintained through paralysing bureaucracy, entrenched patronage
networks and legal witch-hunts against political opponents, that he can afford
to chillax at length in Geneva every year. Meanwhile, in the sealed-off
anglophone regions, the conflict rages on, far from the world’s view.

‘The way things are going now,
the situation will be endless,’ says the NGO source.

The devil comes in

In Buea, capital of the
southwest, we meet human rights lawyer Agbor Nkongho. In 2016, Nkongho led
lawyers and teachers in protests against the government’s efforts to enforce
the use of French in anglophone courts and classrooms. The regime responded
with shooting from the air and on the ground, locking up protesters it labelled
as ‘terrorists’. Today, an estimated 800 to 1,000 people are in prison, many of
them moderates. What had started out as a civil rights protest soon spiralled
into a full-blown conflict. The government’s brutal response mainstreamed
separatist sentiment that had been simmering for decades.

The conflict has its roots in the
botched decolonization of Cameroon in the 1960s. Formerly a German colony, it
was carved up between the British and the French after the First World War.
While French Cameroon gained independence in 1960, the smaller British
Cameroons were denied a shot at self-determination. Instead, they had to choose
between joining Nigeria or French Cameroon. The northern zone went with the
former, the south opting to be folded into French Cameroon. The fledgling
federal state started with two stars on its flag, symbolizing the union. But in
the early 1970s, two stars became one. Francophones, who make up around 80 per
cent of the population, now called the shots. The anglophone regions, rich in
oil and other natural resources, were sidelined into near-insignificance.

A federalist at heart, Nkongho is
caught in the middle. Jailed by the regime for eight months, he has also
received death threats from separatists. Nkongho is critical of the Amba Boys,
who chop off the fingers of workers ignoring strikes, torture teachers defying
their boycott on schools and kill anyone suspected of collaborating with the
state. As the territory descends into chaos, rival diaspora leaders in the West
who are funding the two main militias – the Ambazonia Defence Forces and the
Ambazonia Self-Defence Council – continue to maintain a hard line. In their
battle for supremacy, their fighters occasionally clash in the bush. ‘If they’d
pulled together, they could have obtained territory and controlled it,’ says
Nkongho. ‘If they were really organized, they would open schools and teach the
kids their history.’

There have also been kidnappings,
notably November’s Boko Haram-style seizure of 78 schoolchildren and three
staff members from a school in Bamenda, capital of the northwest. It took place
during a strictly enforced dusk-to-dawn curfew, causing many to question how
the group cleared checkpoints on their 19-kilometre journey to the town of
Bafut, where the hostages were later released. Separatists and the government
blamed each other, the former claiming the abduction was staged to damage their
reputation. On the ground, the jury is still out. Courage, a teacher from
Bamenda, says the children themselves are still giving conflicting stories.

In the anglophone regions, people
now speak of ‘real Ambas’ and ‘fake Ambas’ – the latter covering anything from
alleged state-sponsored mercenaries to the gangs of bandits now roaming the
land. ‘When you have a house that is always quarrelling, the devil outside
realizes and comes in,’ says Brenda, a civil rights activist from Mamfe, in the
southwest.

In February, the conflict spiked
during a 10-day lockdown. In the northwestern town of Kumbo, 176 people –
mostly schoolchildren – were kidnapped and released the next day amid rumours
of ransoms. Kumbo was especially volatile, security forces burning houses and
shops, and threatening hospital staff, according to HRW. In the southwest, a
hospital in the town of Kumba was burned, killing four people. Nobody knows who
did it, but military attacks on hospitals are not uncommon. Wounded locals
often resist being admitted for treatment for fear of being hauled out by
soldiers.

Nkongho estimates that around 30
people lost their lives during February’s violence.

Gerontocracy

The first casualty of war is
truth, they say. Especially in a country where journalists risk being hauled
before a military court for doing their job, increasingly on charges of ‘fake
news’. Currently there are four journalists from anglophone Cameroon in jail,
three of whom are known to be in Yaoundé’s notorious Kondengui Prison. One,
Thomas Awah Junior, of Afrik 2 Radio, is critically ill.

Journalist Mimi Mefo attracted
worldwide support when she was arrested in November 2018. Released on the
orders of President Biya, she was warned that the military would eventually get
her. Living in permanent fear, she continued to work, threatened by online
trolls whom she suspected of being government agents. Now in London, she
believes she will be arrested again if she returns.

‘Many journalists are now doing
self-censorship,’ she says. ‘The government doesn’t want the story of Cameroon
to be told.’

The story of Cameroon right now
is one of a gerontocracy holding ever-tighter on to power, crushing the country
in its death grip. Anglophones are not alone in their opposition to a
government that has over-stayed its welcome – possibly by 26 years. Many
Cameroonians believe Biya stole victory in the 1992 elections from John Fru Ndi
– an anglophone, as it happens.

History repeats itself endlessly
here. Biya, now 86, was re-elected for a seventh mandate last year, amid
allegations of fraud. Though, as one diplomat in Yaoundé notes wryly, the
outcome was already baked into the system. The opposition organized protests, which
ended in mass arrests, including the jailing of opposition leader Maurice Kamto
in January. Potential rivals for power are regularly locked up. Cameroonians
like to joke that an entire parallel government resides in prison, given the
numbers of former high-ranking officials incarcerated.

Observers wonder whether the
anglophone conflict will prove to be the regime’s unravelling. Aside from being
a drain on state finances, it is now hitting export crops like bananas, rubber,
cocoa and coffee hard. And it’s not as if the regime doesn’t have other
problems to contend with. Up in the far north, the war on Boko Haram jihadists
drags on into its fifth year. And in the east, troops are battling armed gangs
from the war-torn Central African Republic.

Diplomatically, the country is
under strain. Traditionally a stable foothold in Central Africa, it has long
escaped international criticism. But last year, it was stripped of hosting the
2019 Africa Cup of Nations, partly owing to security concerns. And, this year,
the US scaled back military aid, citing concerns over human rights violations.
It’s unclear whether the move was in response to abuses in the anglophone
regions or in the far north, where soldiers have also wielded their ‘licence to
kill’ with reckless abandon. Either way, it came as a blow to the regime.

The President is fighting back,
employing the services of Glover Park Group, a Washington DC-based lobbying and
communications firm. In the anglophone regions, people despair that the
narrative is going Biya’s way, the state asserting its right to crush
‘terrorists’ and ‘criminals’, who often turn out to be innocents. NGOs at the
mercy of capricious bureaucrats who can withhold passes dare not speak of the
abuses they witness lest they lose access to the conflict zone.

One international aid worker, who
is assisting people in the bush, agrees that Biya may be winning the PR war.
‘But that’s the only war he’s winning,’ he says. ‘The military know that brute
force is not going to win the conflict. You can’t catch so many people hidden
in the population.’

‘On the ground people are blaming
the government,’ says one journalist in Buea. ‘The people are fed up. The
government has failed.’